The late CEO of US coal mining firm Drummond personally allegedly ordered the assassination of labor union representatives at one of his company’s mines in Colombia in 2001, according to war crimes tribunal JEP.
The court made this claim in a report on the interrogation of the security chief of one of Drummond’s contractors, Jairo Jesus Charris.
The security chief of food provider ISA was convicted for two of the homicides allegedly ordered by Drummond executives in 2009 together with ISA CEO Jaime Blanco.
According to Charris, Drummond security chief James Lee Atkins, a former CIA agent, told him and Blanco that Drummond CEO Garry Drummond had personally ordered the assassinations of union reps.
Drummond allegedly ordered the killings because the activity of labor union Sintramienergetica was hampering profits and accused of having ties with the now-defunct guerrilla group FARC.
On March 6, 2001, Mr. James Atkins told us, Jaime Blanco Maya and Jairo Jesús Charris Castro, that he had a direct order from Mr. Gary Drummond to assassinate all the directors of the labor union of the multinational Drummond, that the company was going through a bad time in coal sales to the international markets because of the Drummond union that was lowering the production of coal and the many explosive attacks on the Drummond company’s trains due to the alleged relationship that the Drummond union had with guerrilla group FARC.
Jairo Jesus Charris
Atkins was personally involved in the planning of the double homicide for which Charris was convicted, ISA’s former security chief said.
Drummond’s security chief ordered the security chief of La Loma, the company’s mine in the Cesar province, to warn the commander of the local unit of paramilitary group AUC when the Sintramienergetica representatives went home on March 12 of 2001.
The paramilitaries stopped the bus that was transporting the union reps and executed them on the side of the road.
Mike Tracy, Drummond’s global operations chief, and Drummond Colombia director Augusto Jimenez knew “what was going to be done” about the labor union representatives.
Charris and Maya both submitted before the JEP in an attempt to be released from prison in exchange for the truth about the US mining firm’s ties to the AUC, which was declared a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department in September of 2001.
Drummond, who was also a member of the board of the Boy Scouts of America, died in 2016.
